"This story sounds mean." That's the opening, or disclaimer maybe, on a piece on Gizmodo where Alyssa Bereznak wrote off a potential OKCupid romance because her internet date, is a nerd. "Nerd" is also her word. What did this guy do to be written off so quickly, so publicly and by name on a widely read (and normally nerd-friendly) website?

He played Magic: The Gathering. Actually, he didn't just play it, he was the world champion at it. It's a fantasy card game that you'll find in the same shops where you buy comic books and Dungeons & Dragons gear; shops indisputably associated with geekery. I must admit, the article took me back. I remember when internet dating itself was associated with geekery and being unable to find a date on your own time. Back then it was never something you would admit to publicly – sort of like playing Magic. Maybe it still carries that stigma for some; maybe that's why the writer felt the need to add a second disclaimer: "I came home drunk and made an OKCupid profile."

But those days are long gone, right? Geeks are chic. Everyone's using social media and MTV gives you their VJs' Twitter handles on screen during the Video Music Awards. Comic-Con's gone Hollywood and online role-playing game World of Warcraft has 11.1 million users. Sites such as Gizmodo revel in gadgets and tech that used to be exclusively the domain of uber-nerds.

Bereznak's point is fair, I suppose: you may want to know if you have anything in common with a person before you continue dating him or her. If a prospective suitor has a hobby that's a big enough part of his life that he's the world champion at it, I can see deciding that things might not work. What I can't understand is the need to essentially shame him for being a nerd in front of the entire internet. She jokes (at least, I hope it's a joke) that he "infiltrated" his way into OKCupid dates with two other people she sort of knows, as though not disclosing his nerdy hobby is the same as covert ops.

Paul Tassi at Forbes argues that Bereznak is engaged in "the tried-and-true practice of online nerd-baiting" to get page views, by which Gawker Media employees are paid (Gizmodo is a Gawker site). He points out that running this post on a tech blog instead of its sister site Jezebel, with a female audience, "speaks volumes about what they were trying to do". Of course the male audience at Gizmodo is outraged, and outrage breeds clicks – and angry comments, and responses.

There is, at bottom, a message that Bereznak wants us to take from her piece, beyond "geeks? eww!". "No online dating profile in the world is comprehensive enough to highlight every person's peccadillo, or anticipate the inane biases that each of us lugs around," she says. Again, fair enough. I'm not a fan of trying to reduce people to lists of characteristics, and as Bereznak points out, it's impossible to tell what will turn you off or on about a person from an OKCupid profile. It's just that it's impossible to tell from a thorough Google search, too. Somewhere in there, you have to take a risk, instead of sitting behind the safety of a computer screen. It's interesting that the one thing in this pseudo-confessional story we never learn is whether Bereznak found Finkel attractive; if there were sparks.

I never would've picked out the last man I fell for in an internet-dating lineup; he wouldn't have looked right or been into the right things, and I long ago gave up dating men because we like the same bands or they have the right tattoos. In a world where we have a gizmo for everything, where algorithms choose our music, our movies and our dates, I want a bit of human contact, something that hasn't been weighed and measured first. That real connection is the last bit of magic that I believe in. Why would I want more reasons to shut it out?